Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

  The year 1884 would mark a great stage, however inconclusive, in the work of making the cathedral, when an extraordinary enterprise took place. The stone enclosure was complete as far as the adobe sanctuary and side chapel. Old St Francis’s stood complete within the new; and now the citizens of Santa Fe, on a volunteer basis, came to take down, brick by brick and timber by timber, the original church; and for weeks carried these elements out the new stone door to waiting waggons until nothing was left of the original nave, and the new columns and arches and vaulting were revealed in their stark, plain, but fine symmetry. The new walls were joined to the earthen walls of the old transepts. The cathedral had its complete interior, made of both new and old; and in an eloquent way its contrasting styles and materials spoke for the history—heritage and experience—embraced by Lamy’s life. In the dirt floor of the sanctuary (compacted dust carpeted over) Lamy would finally direct that two graves be dug and walled with concrete where the archbishops of Santa Fe would lie, the graves to be in line with the epistle side of the high altar.

  The French inheritance was most fully realized when the Chapel of Our Lady of Light at the Loretto convent was completed in 1878. Of a much smaller scale than the cathedral, the chapel represented less of a continuing burden financially. Young Projectus Mouly had given it his time as architect during the five-year lapse of construction on St Francis’s. It was believed that the chapel was built after memories of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris; and in greatly more humble terms—heavy where the original was light, stolid where the other was elegant—it did make certain allusions to its great model. It rose, slender and narrow, in the Gothic style, with rows of finials along the tops of the walls against the steep-sloping red roof. The chapel was twenty-five feet wide and seventy-five deep, including the sanctuary. Shallow stone and mortar buttresses stood against the walls at symmetrical intervals. An extended crown-like needle rested on top of the roof—though at the sanctuary end rather than above the center of the nave as in Paris. There was a rose window in the facade, and the main door was arched and decorated with trefoils and free-standing articulated pilasters. Arches and lesser windows were set in the front under the sharply angled roof line. The ochreous gray stone like that of the cathedral, and the volcanic material for the roof, came from Lamy’s nearby quarries. Windows of stained glass had been ordered from France and were installed in time for the consecration performed on 25 April 1878, by Monsignor Eguillon, vicar general, and chaplain of the convent.

  The Loretto sisters saw the work proceed without interruption, though there were certain difficulties. Projectus Mouly was an energetic worker—he once rode to Denver on a burro to obtain a rotary stone crusher—and he was also an artist with a strong vision. When certain “persons in authority criticized his work” as architect and engineer of the chapel, asking for changes in the design, he took offense, refused to agree to alterations, resigned, and, declared a watchful and sympathetic nun, fell into bad company. He wrote to his father in France telling what had happened, even giving reassurances that his new companion, with his fault (probably drinking), of which the father knew, would not endanger him. But it was not long until Projectus died of pneumonia in St Vincent’s Hospital.

  Yet work on the chapel continued without interruption; and the sisters by their prudent financial management of their income-producing school evidently faced no such crises as Lamy with his cathedral. They imported from France a harmonium for the choir loft—an instrument by Debain, who described himself as “Inventeur de I’harmonium” and one who held a patent “By appointment to the Emperor.” With an oak veneer case, a single manual, and two carpeted treadles, the harmonium had, in addition to the usual stops, several which made “effects’’ possible—a saxophone (after the horn invented in Belgium in 1840), a musette or bagpipe, accordion, a celesta, and, for ardent moments, the tremblant. The entire chapel “so creditable to the Territory,” said the New Mexican, was “entirely due to the efforts and consideration of Archbishop Lamy, who has given the work from the commencement his personal attention and supervision.” He was so often at the construction site that, as with the cathedral builders, he would take his lunch with the masons and carpenters of the chapel. Completed before any of the other foreign buildings of the city, the chapel by itself gave a strong first statement of the forces of change.

  More were to come. A few weeks before the Loretto chapel was dedicated, the Christian Brothers began to demolish their old college farther up the lane known as College street. In the middle of the month the cornerstone was laid for a two-storey building with a third storey incorporated in a mansard roof. A tall central cupola rose at the center. The walls were made of adobes—the college quickly became celebrated as the tallest adobe building erected in the Southwest. It stood just south of the old chapel of San Miguel, which was in a dilapidated condition since its adobe towers had collapsed during a strong storm, to lie in heaps of rubble against the front. The new college rose upon the contributions raised by Brother Botolph, the president. Various parishes and towns gave money, many individuals gave sheep, others oxen, heifers, a goat, lumber, until the building cost of $19,362 was met. With that structure, once again central France came into view. In its long, three-tiered facade, its Mansard roof, its ranks of symmetrical windows, it was akin, even if remotely, to the seminary of Mont-Ferrand, where the archbishop and so many of his clergy had taken their studies; and in its long dim narrow corridors, ribbed in dark wood, with classrooms and faculty quarters on the first two floors, and dormitories on the third behind the gable windows, it brought the very image of a propriety never before seen in such purpose at Santa Fe.

  It stood also as strong evidence of the achievements in education of the Brothers, under the rule of their order across the world; and the other New Mexico cities where they maintained schools could see St Michael’s as the monument to an ideal of education which, even as later secular schools and colleges came rapidly to life, first helped the territory to join the world. Again the visible character of Santa Fe knew change from the old manner of three centuries of flat earthen roofs where grass took seed.

  The last of the religious buildings to come with Lamy’s program of building in the alien style was the academy of the Loretto sisters. It stood just to the south of the unfinished cathedral, and was completed in 1881. Again, it was a building of adobe, rising sixty feet to three storeys, with a pointed cupola supporting a cross. Its manner reflected mid-nineteenth-century continental architecture, with a mansard roof faced in slate from St Louis which Mother Magdalen in one of her last official acts went personally to buy and bring home. Again the sisters, with Lamy’s firm support, proceeded on their own to create a building of dignity, decorously in harmony with the sophisticated idiom of its time, in contrast to the simple fabrications of Santa Fe, which in outline so often resembled the drawings of children unencumbered with any but local, and locally sufficient, manners. Conviction and energy saw the venture to a successful finish. “We started our own brickyard and opened our own quarry,” said Mother Magdalen, “had our own lime burnt to order and our own lumber sawn by our own natives.…”

  The adobe walls were plastered in stucco. Carved wooden cornices and window frames and porch details gave the building a strict charm; and now the chain of Lamy’s buildings reached from Cathedral Place up College street and across Santa Fe Creek to the new St Michael’s College. All of these loomed over the town. All served the imperatives of the now expanding society; and all finally made the next invasion of style—that of the eastern Americans with their red brick houses, their middle western Victorian commercial and domestic buildings—seem like a proper expression of the times: the territorial epoch which finally made Lamy’s edifices less exotic, until the twentieth century’s rediscovery and adaptive restoration of the original character of Santa Fe’s first three centuries.

  With the greater facilities of the new St Michael’s College, Lamy began an experiment in the education of a small group of Indian youths
from the Pueblos. The federal government, at public expense, was already sending young Indians to two Protestant Indian schools—one at Albuquerque, the other at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Lamy was concerned for the loss of their religious belief and habit by these students; and in 1878 he was able to persuade the government to guarantee one hundred dollars each to pay the expenses of twenty-two students who would be enrolled in a special department of the college. It was a small beginning, but it was expected to increase as the learning of the Indian youths proved itself. One priest who examined the class was “astonished at their remarkable proficiency in reading and writing English and Spanish.’ He was equally impressed by their progress in arithmetic, and he cited their otherwise commonplace gains because it was thought and said by many “that the Indian is sluggish and slow in learning, whereas the reverse is the case,” which could be proved by every mission school in the pueblos—but the priest-teacher could visit the pueblo classes only once a month.

  Yet when the time came for the government to send its promised payment for the Indian scholars at Santa Fe, nothing was sent, and all efforts, including a memorial to Congress, failed to obtain the funds. The Commissioner for Indian Affairs at Washington—one Price—wrote that “he could not entertain the idea.” Lamy bitterly concluded that the whole government was as anti-Catholic as the President—U. S. Grant. Since neither the college nor the archdiocese could afford the needed twenty-two hundred dollars for the young Indians’ annual expenses, much less look forward to an expansion of the program, the special Indian class was dropped after a year. The government schools, “under the special direction of Presbyterians and Methodists,” prospered and grew with public funds.

  Lamy’s other schools—those of the Lorettines, the Sisters of Charity, the Christian Brothers, the Jesuits, variously in Santa Fe, Taos, Los Alamos, Albuquerque, Socorro, and elsewhere—made their way steadily, responding to immigration from the East, and to good management.

  At the Santa Fe Loretto convent there was a change of administration: Mother Magdalen Hayden, who had accepted the post of superior on the bank of the Missouri River in 1852, was obliged by rheumatic ill health to resign her post. She was succeeded by Marie Lamy, who became Mother Francesca. Now approaching full middle age, she had grown into a capable maturity, and her appointment was popular with her sisters. She and her uncle remained as close as ever in affection and temperament; and their sense of family was sustained by the nearness of Marie’s surviving brother Jean and his wife, who lived in Santa Fe for some years. Mother Francesca, continuing the policies of her predecessor, was able to offer new courses of instruction added since those announced in earlier years, and now the making of young ladies (of whom “propriety of deportment, politeness, and personal neatness” were required), would include the arts of “Wax flowers, materials furnished, $20 per course”; “Artificial or Hair flowers, $10”; “Harp, $30”; “Guitar, instrument furnished by pupil, $40.” Non-Catholic pupils “were not required to assist at the religious instruction given to the Catholics.”

  The Sisters of Charity, led by the energetic Sister Blandina Segale, pressed forward with the building of an “industrial school” at Santa Fe, which was the last project erected under the supervision of young Projectus Mouly. It was opened in 1880 with a festival concert, with Mr Wedles at the piano, and a vocal solo by Mrs Dr Symington; but its career was inauspicious, and after a few years it was obliged to close down.

  At the same time, a non-sectarian academy was flourishing. Founded in 1877, it was in its fourth year in 1881, with distinguished overseers including Bishop George K. Dunlop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Acting Governor Ritch, Chief Justice Prince, and members of the leading families of Spiegelberg and Catron. Strong new elements of the society were in their turn reaching for amenity as Lamy had done since the beginning of his work in the vast and disorderly diocese. With the coming of the railroads and new settlers, the Southwest was drawn more closely into the national character; and a diversity of styles in ways of expression was inevitable, and, under the idea of the federal republic, desirable. But the Great American Desert was slow to lose all of its Spanish colonial and western frontier nature.

  v.

  Atmospheres

  VERY MUCH A CITIZEN of his capital, Lamy—many spoke of him as the “first citizen”—was open to visitors, and was also frequently seen walking in the plaza or taking his way to errands. The town he saw was as lively as ever, but there was a sense of good government for New Mexico ever since the arrival of Lew Wallace to preside in the Governor’s Palace in 1878. “It appears that the Territory has been afflicted, as most new Territories are, with a ring of rascals, who congregate about the seat of government and pluck the tax-payers in every possible way. Wallace has smashed this ring right and left, and has his pay in the gratitude of the people.”

  The governor was seen as “above reproach, a man of strong principles, and a student of humanity.” He set about halting the Lincoln County War in southeastern New Mexico, where rival factions were terrorizing the country, with William Bonney, a youthful murderer calling himself Billy the Kid, as the leading criminal. Wallace posted an award of five hundred dollars for his capture, and Bonney responded—so said Mrs Wallace—by declaring, “I mean to ride into the plaza at Santa Fe, hitch my horse in front of the palace, and put a bullet through Lew Wallace.” One of her friends warned her to “close the shutters at evening, so the bright light of the student’s lamp might not make such a shining mark of the governor writing till late on Ben Hur.…” But instead, Bonney was brought to Santa Fe and jailed. Later he was returned to Lincoln for trial, escaped from the old courthouse after killing two guards, and was shot to death himself by Sheriff Pat Garrett in a dark room at Fort Sumner.

  The peace was broken also in Arizona, where Salpointe was working to build a hospital. Not only Apaches, now, but “cow boys” were on the rampage in cow-stealing raids. Apaches also in southern New Mexico and Utes in Colorado were sowing terror again. Wallace asked Washington for authority to raise troops, but the War Department replied—in the face of his report of outrages—that it had “no information as to the nature of the outbreak or number of hostiles,” and permission was denied. Satisfactions must remain merely personal, then. Ben Hur had been published, the first edition of five thousand copies was instantly exhausted, and “the author smiles.” Lamy received an autographed copy from General Wallace, with whom he was on excellent terms.

  Business was quickening, the city was expanding. Lamy “heartily” endorsed the growing manufacturing interests of Santa Fe. The Church owned considerable property by now, and that part which contained the cathedral, the hospital, and the orphanage, offered a logical site for the extension of the street running east from the plaza. A committee was planning to call upon him to grant the right of way for Palace avenue, and he was known to be willing. The street would run all the way to the eastern limits of the city, into the very foothills of the mountains. By the opening up of the new thoroughfare, the hospital would stand on the very edge of the street. Railroad promotion was also in the air, and one diarist ironically thought new spur lines would depopulate Las Vegas and Santa Fe, and he noted also “a large hotel scheme” for the ruins of Pecos. “Schemes,” he said, “and scheming, and nothing else.” In a later generation, a churchman, viewing the mission field of New Mexico, thought it good, but added that “the theology of the dollar was more in vogue there than that of Saint Thomas.…”

  The energies of self-awareness were strong enough by 1883 for Santa Fe to mount a Territorial Exposition commemorating the history of three and a third centuries of New Mexico, arbitrarily dating 1550 as the founding year—though at that time no white men were in the region. A wooden exhibition hall was erected, the rafters and walls were draped with patriotic bunting and an abundance of American flags, and boughs of pine were interlaced with rafters and joists. Exhibits traced the history of the area since the time of Cabeza de Vaca, and open booths set forth the products
of the territory. Great pyramids of fruits, vegetables, preserves, and handiwork were laid on tables. Glass cases held examples of Indian crafts and historical objects, Indian blankets hung on the walls, and an occasional Indian in ceremonial dress stood among the black broadcloth figures of his conquerors. Minerals of all kinds were displayed, and merchandise, including knitted hammocks, sewing machines, office supplies, and, through placards inviting orders, Chickering pianos. Japanese lanterns hung from the beams and a fountain in a cement octagonal bowl played at the center of the hall. The whole was “a novel and interesting sight,” and it spoke of the progress for which the territory was reaching in civil and economic affairs.

  Susan Wallace, of Indiana, thought Santa Fe, “though dirty and unkempt, swarming with hungry dogs,” yet had “the charm of foreign flavor, and, like San Antonio, retains some portion of the grace which long lingers about, if indeed it ever forsakes, the spot where Spain has held rule for centuries.” Citizens of a newer strain could have a “pleasant evening” at singing parties held in the evenings at the First National Bank, while deploring “ugly music” which issued forth from saloons. The Union Restaurant in lower San Francisco street advertised meals at all hours for thirty-five cents, and those who wanted to drink beer in the shade or roll ten pins could go to Miller’s Summer Garden in South Santa Fe street, or meet their friends for spirited conversation of an evening at the brewery. “In the evening took oysters,” recorded the diarist, and all knew that Miller’s received fresh oysters daily—Mallory’s famous “Diamond” brand of Baltimore oysters. By day, one “saw Pueblo Indians on the streets, fine fellows, clad in white with hair tressed behind and hanging down on each side. Driving a herd of burros.” Burros were everywhere, most of them bringing bundles of piñon wood from the hills, many of them used for riding, and a troop of “Burro Cavalry” was maintained by the United States garrison.